In this week’s episode of Two-Minute Tech Tuesday, we'll continue the conversation about JSON Web Tokens. Last week, we demonstrated how JSON Web Tokens are composed and used in Varnish. This week, we'll show you how to turn Varnish into an authentication gateway that issues them.

In this week’s episode of Two-Minute Tech Tuesday, we'll introduce you to JSON Web Tokens and demonstrate how to validate them in Varnish Enterprise using vmod_jwt. 

Varnish modules (VMODs) are modules that extend the functionality of Varnish. Many VMODs work on their own to contribute a feature or benefit while others work in conjunction with external resources.

When using a traditional CDN or caching system, creating user-centric security and access policies can be a complex and performance challenging undertaking. Not only do you have to pull user data from a backend, but you then have to apply the security policies from that data onto the request. VCL is an excellent candidate for the latter problem of applying security policies to requests. This leaves the problem of how you get user data (JSON) into VCL? How do you do that on a user-by-user basis? And how do you do that in a way where you keep backend communication to an absolute minimum, or put another way, serve as much data from cache as possible?